VE Day: The Fall Of The Third Reich (Part 7)

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Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a a four-litre jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called it truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.

A huge, unfamiliar city.

The smoke from burning buildings shrouded its outlines.

Whole districts of ruins gave it the appearance of fantasy.

Just under six years before, an invasion of Europe, criminal and unprecedented in its brutality, was launched from here.

And now to here, it had returned.

That was the very well spoken Jelena Cargan, who's an interpreter in the third assault army of the Red Army.

Yes.

And welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me, Al Murray and James Holland, of course, for Victory 45, Episode 7, as we try as best we can to bring the war to an end.

And at the time, they had trouble bringing the Second World War to an end.

And so are we.

It required superhuman effort.

But there's so much to say, isn't there?

There's so much going on.

You know, there's an infinite number of moving parts.

That is the simple truth.

And also, we don't want to deny our listeners the opportunity.

Short change anyone.

I'm shortchanging anyone.

I don't want to sort of, you know, hurry through one bit.

And it's been a long time coming.

And also, i mean the thing is is within all this as well as the sort of high politics end of it and you know general eyeballing general and the german political end of things coming to grips with the fact they've lost but there's these absolutely incredible personal stories individual stories right in the heart of it and i think i mean what we're going to talk about in this episode really i think this is what's so amazing about the second world war is yes it's a titanic event and it's the tectonic plates of history colliding and all those sort of things isn't it but in it there's the most amazing things that happen to individuals yes and i think it's important that we don't lose sight of that this you know millions is a statistic and all the rest of it yeah exactly it is about individuals so it's good for us to tell a few of these stories i think yeah elena cargan's story is absolutely incredible so she's a 25 year old interpreter attached to third shock army we said in a previous episode didn't we that we always remember that these armies are made up of people from the soviet union rather than russia yes although she is actually russian yeah yeah yeah yeah she is russian And although she wasn't born in Moscow, she's actually from Belarusia.

Yeah.

Strictly speaking, she moves to Moscow.

She considers herself a Muscovite.

She studied philosophy at Moscow State University.

And I think this is the important thing to remember about the Soviet Union.

It is a totalitarian state.

But, you know, it's equal, unequal rights for...

women as much as men.

Yes, but this is a product of the revolution.

The fact she's going to university and studying philosophy.

This is a directly revolutionary product.

She wants to go to the front.

She's drafted as a munitions worker, then trains as a nurse.

This reminds me of the women of SOE.

Someone spots that she can speak German.

Yeah.

That's a really good point.

Oh, hang on a minute.

Yelena's really great at German.

We'll send her to a school for interpreters.

And so she's recruited for interpreting.

And then in February of 1942, she goes to front.

So, I mean, not that long after, you know, within eight months of the war starting, basically.

And she's been interrogating prisoners, looking at captured documents.

And, you know, is finding the work incredibly fulfilling.

Yeah, well, because, you know, she's witnessing great events and so on and part of it all.

And yeah, just finding it absolutely totally compelling.

And why wouldn't you?

You know, you're witnessing history, aren't you?

Well, you know what's going on.

I mean, that's the other thing.

No one knows what's going on in time of war.

But anyway, she's at the front, but she's not the vanguard of the troops because, of course, she's not infantry, she's an interpreter.

So she crosses into Germany at a checkpoint with a large, roughly constructed archway and sign that says this was the German border.

And then a second sign had been erected just beyond that, which had been dubbed.

I just want to excuse my French, by the way.

But this is what it said.

It's not my words.

It says, take a good look.

This is fucking Germany.

Amazing.

Yeah.

So she and her companions then reached Berlin that same evening, the 29th of April.

So we're going back in a little bit of time from episode six.

The city seems to be on fire.

You know, she sees huge tongues of flame rising high above, you know, the jagged remains of buildings and searchlights sweeping the sky, and there's ever-present rumble of artillery that kind of fills the ears, makes the ground tremble.

You know, it's a city that's completely in ruins.

There absolutely is the acrid stench of cordite on the air,

and also the stench of charred timber, of explosives, of decay.

And they pause for the night because she's in a little kind of car with her driver and a couple of other guys.

And they pause for the night, waiting for orders.

They're still on the edge of the city.

And Elena sits on an abandoned oil drum beside an equally abandoned bakery with bordered-up windows, above which is gilded gothic writing, which says Franz Schulz Feinbacherai.

I mean, it's just so vivid, isn't it?

Don't you think?

I mean, it is, it absolutely is.

You can absolutely see it, you know, you really, really can.

So, a dismal scene, made even more so by the morning, and offset or kind of heightened by the fact that every so often a building is collapsing somewhere not so far away, and you can hear this sort of crash of masonry and timber.

And as dawn breaks, slowly Berliners emerge from their kind of subterranean existence, you know, on the hunt for food and water.

Because, of course, you know, the main supplies have been cut off, electricity's cut, you know, there's no shops open.

I mean, it is apocalyptic.

I mean, yeah, really.

Yeah.

And then they get on the go again, and the closer they get to the center, there's kind of non-stop gunfire, small arms hammering away, artillery rounds exploding, smoke, smoke, fumes swirling, rising into the air.

And, you know, she just finds the air completely suffocating.

And she's also struck by how cruelly pointless was the German high command's insistence on continuing to fight, which is, you know, what you and I have said repeatedly.

Yeah, we keep saying this, don't we?

We keep saying it.

You know, well, Jelena would be one with us.

And, you know, she's there.

Yeah.

Berlin's completely surrounded.

It's completely over.

It's been all over for months.

In fact, you know, as I've argued, and you're a a little bit more generous than me, you know, it's years since they've had any chance of succeeding at all.

Yeah.

And certainly years since any idea of concessions or a more even advantageous peace for Germany,

that moment has also passed, hasn't it?

Yeah, completely.

Middle 1943, maybe they could say, well, right, we'll stop.

We'll withdraw from here to there and, you know, retrench.

But that's not the mindset, is it?

I mean, Hitler has got his Gotta Dammering.

It's Fausnier Reich or it's Armageddon, and he's got it.

Exactly.

He's got his Armageddon.

So they push on into the center of town.

She can feel grit in her teeth and smoke at the back of her throat.

I mean, we've all been through smoke.

You feel it, don't you?

Right at the back of the throat, it's sort of gagging.

Yeah.

And in your eyes and everything.

And in your eyes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's female soldiers, you know, Red Army soldiers directing traffic.

And they come to a halt as a bunch of weary Frenchmen.

Of course, Frenchmen there.

You know, this is an international city these days because of the amount of different forced laborers all over the place.

And they're trudging down the road.

One with a French flag draped over his case.

Yeah, there's fires, and some are small, some are larger.

No effort to put them out because there's no water.

Yeah, you can't.

Yeah, you're better at reading German than I am.

Well, there's this graffiti: Unzer Mauen Brachen, unsrehertzen nicht.

Our walls are broken, but not our hearts.

But I think that's a little unlikely.

The second half,

yeah.

Some wishful thinking.

Basically, she says, it was very difficult to find your way through the city map reading because we'd run out of Russian signs, and the German ones have mostly disappeared along with the waltz.

So it's just this sort of, you know, smashed ruins.

So they are civvies.

Excuse me, can you direct me the way to Reichstag?

Yeah, and imagine how pleased the civilians are just to be asked directions by some Soviets.

I mean, that's the other thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Give me your wristwatch.

Extraordinary.

This sort of

weird sort of surreal time, I think.

It's just, it's really, really clear, isn't it?

They push on.

Streets become increasingly deserted the closer they get to the government district.

So this is around Wilhelmstrasse and Potsdamer Platz and all that kind of stuff.

You know, and the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag.

Case of bullets zipping and hissing by, you know, tinny sounding machine guns.

And machine guns from not very far distance, they do sound tinny.

Yeah.

They sound like they're in a kind of echo chamber.

It's really, really odd.

I was really struck by this, you know, when I was in Florida the other day and listening to all these people hammering away at their 50 cows.

You know, it does sound tinny.

More walls and buildings crashing around.

They reach Potsdamer Platz, and then they kind of set themselves up in a basement of a house owned by a tailor and his family and begin the process of interrogating squealers in inverted comets.

So these are captured prisoners, many of whom are just boys in outsize uniforms.

And you remember that Helmut Altner gets issued his uniform and he feels like a scarecrow because it's so big.

Because these uniforms are built for men.

They're not meant for teenagers.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

Yeah.

And she says, you know, we were interested in just one thing.

Where was Hitler?

Yeah.

So that is what she has gone to central Berlin and set up shop to do, to find the Führer.

The thing to remember, of course, is that I think we've emphasized this before, is no one knows about the Führerbunker.

It's this strange business.

The story is so well told, the Fuhrer Bunker, so present in people's minds.

But actually, no one knows he's there or where he might be.

And the Soviets are completely in the same situation as anyone else in that regard, aren't they?

They've no idea.

Now, I mean, what's it like being a civilian in Berlin, though?

It's pretty grim.

It's pretty, pretty grim.

And well, we're lucky because there are quite a lot of diaries from from this.

And one that I'm really, really interested in is Ruf Andreas Friedrich, who's a fascinating character because, you know, she was one of the comparatively few people who wasn't enthralled to Hitler, even back in the days of 1933 in the early 30s, where he seemingly could do no wrong.

She's got a partner who's a German-Russian composer called Leo Borchard.

And both of them have always thought that...

Nazi anti-Semitism is completely abhorrent.

And throughout the war, at massive personal risk, it has to be said.

While they're still in Berlin, they lead an underground resistance movement called uncle emil yeah absolutely incredible this so they live in a suburb called seglitz which is sort of south of tempelhof sort of south-central berlin i mean still an area to this day so before the war they were helping jews to escape and during it they supported a number who incredibly were still living in the city there were quite a few people who survived the entire war u-boats they called themselves yes yeah yeah they would take their badges off and lots of them lived in the open in the city would take their badges off yeah there's some amazing stuff about that.

I mean, that is a whole other sidebar, that book, Stella, about the Jewish woman who turned informant and

worked for the Gestapo, which is absolutely incredible stuff.

Yeah, well, isn't that the one that the Good German was based on?

Roughly, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The true story is far more dramatic than the film.

The film is awful, but the novel is brilliant.

It's absolutely brilliant, that novel.

Oh my god, it's good.

She was blonde and would go into cafes and would spot people and go, yeah, they're Jews.

And I mean, awful.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I've just done spoiler alert in the end of anyone who wants to read good Germany, by the way.

I've just ruined it for them.

Anyway, it's a brilliant book.

You can't do spoilers with true stories, Jim.

That's what I always say.

So, Leo Bourchard, you know, all this time lives under a complete false identity of Andrik Krasnau.

Amazing.

Yeah.

So, you know, Ruth, Leo, Andrik, whatever he wants to call himself.

So they've survived and they've been handing out leaflets of the White Rose, for example.

White Rose is a group in Munich.

Amazing.

Yeah.

And obviously, they, you know, doing what they're doing is even more dangerous after the July plot of the previous July 1944.

But anyway, they have somehow survived.

You know, some people do kind of manage to kind of slip through the net, so to speak.

And they've been hiding in a cellar while the Battle of Berlin has been raging.

So Roof, Leo stroke Andrik, plus four illegals, as well as a Mongolian soldier.

you know, Red Army soldier, he's just arrived and he's sort of part of their gang now.

And Andrik, Leo, we'll just call him Andrik from now on.

Andrik can speak speak Russian and manage to keep the Mongolian from assaulting the women by drinking with him most nights.

Because they can see that he's been looking at them lasciviously.

Yeah.

So on the 1st of May, with the battle having passed them, they then head south back to their home in Seglitz, picking their way through the destruction.

We clamber over bomb craters.

No, it's Ruth in her diary.

We squeeze through tangled barbed wire and hastily constructed barricades of furniture.

Again, it's a very sort of vivid image, isn't it?

Yeah.

You know, and I always kind of think, you know, what might work in 1848 in Paris is just not really going to cut it against T-34s or Sherman tanks, is it?

You know, barricades of furniture.

Just don't bother.

No, give up.

Yeah, well, give up.

Anyway, she absolutely struggles to comprehend the insanity of trying to defend the city with sofas.

And she's right to.

You know, there's a tank riddled with holes blocking their way.

And, you know, just as Jelena experienced, the air is heavy with the stench of death and sweat and smoke and burnt out buildings.

And she spots, as she's heading back to Seglitz, she spots an old man sitting by a piece of broken wall, a pipe in one hand and a lighter in the other.

And he's completely motionless.

And only when she saw a fly crawl over his face does she realize he's dead.

I mean, you know, there's some going to be some grim scenes, aren't there?

Yeah.

Eventually they reach home.

It's, it's still standing.

It's one of the few that still is.

But once up in the house, they're overwhelmed by the stench and the place has been ransacked and, you know, excreta left on the bathroom floor.

You know, this is Russians have come in and they just run amok.

So the following day, 2nd of May, they've done their best to clear up the house.

They learn that Hitler's dead.

And they haven't even realized he's in Berlin, which absolutely proves your point.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think what she says, this thing she says, is really, really, really interesting.

And it's sort of kind of a universal effect across.

the whole of Germany.

She says, suddenly we've become aware of the absurdity of this moment.

Hitler is dead and we act as if it didn't concern us.

Events have overtaken us.

The Third Reich has vanished like a ghost.

Yes, yes.

And I think that is the spell is broken.

It's extraordinary.

Well, I think, you know, you and I have lived through momentous moments.

I remember the kind of onset of the Gulf War and watching it live on television in 1992.

You know, I remember Thatcher being out in whenever it was, 1991.

Well, the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Oh, the fall of the Berlin Wall and all that, and the end of communism in the Soviet Union.

And of course, you know, the lockdown, you know, these big moments.

and they're so shocking when they happen.

But the shock only lasts for a very short period of time.

And then you just, or Brexit, in my case, I was sort of in despair for about a week, but you just have that moment, and then suddenly you sort of go, oh, okay, this is the new normal.

And something that has been holding German lies for so long, the fragility of this, the rottenness at the core of the Nazi state, the totally flimsy foundations on which it's based.

It's something that you and I have talked about a lot over the last few years.

Yeah.

Suddenly, Suddenly, that has come to bear.

And you realise, yeah, okay, it was just an intransient.

Yeah.

Yes, yes, yes, exactly.

It's not permanent.

It's not a thousand years.

It was never going to be a thousand years.

All this destruction, all this hatred, all this malevolence all was completely pointless.

Yeah.

And what's interesting in what she says is that, you know, she's someone who's been opposed to Nazism the whole of its existence.

And she says, and we act as if it didn't concern us.

That's amazing, isn't it?

All right, okay.

That's the end of that then.

And also, I think it's not unsensible to live in the world you're actually in once the red army have turned up rather than

worry about the one that's yeah no no absolutely absolutely but it is amazing how resilient the human mind is i think and how able to cope one is you know when great events happen they are shocking but you do adjust you just do you know events have overtaken hitler he's suddenly an irrelevance yeah that individual who's so important i mean you know the exactly the same thing would happen if you know a modern leader suddenly was you know struck down died whatever You would be shocked for a bit, and then you'd think, oh, well, move on then.

Anyway, but we've talked about Helmut Altner a little bit,

and you know, he's still alive and he's still fighting.

And, you know, the battle is over, but it's not for all the German soldiers in Berlin.

You know, some are still fighting on, and this is basically sort of sweeping westwards through the city.

The city is surrounded, but the fighting is still kind of pushing from the center, from the Reichstag towards sort of Schlottenberg and Spandau and that kind of, you know, and Gattau, that kind of area, area, really.

Yeah.

And he says something actually interestingly similar when he hears about Hitler's death, doesn't he?

At first, he says he felt as though someone had hit him over the head, but then it is all the same to me.

It hardly bothers me.

For the time is over when I once thought that the heavens would collapse if that man no longer lived.

Oh, there you are.

That's sort of my point, really.

But isn't that extraordinary?

Because he's from the other end of the spectrum, isn't he?

Yeah, he's grown up with it.

He's grown up in Nazism, you know.

And so obviously, he now has to figure out what to do.

Yeah, because he's five when Hitler comes to power.

Yeah, exactly.

And he discovers on the 1st of May, on the same day, that he hears from a friend, Hermann Windhorst, who passes him an armed service report that says Hitler's dead.

Now, Windhorst is 58.

That's his mate.

That's his mate in the army.

He's a 58-year-old.

I mean, it's very odd, isn't it?

And they now, with Windhorst and their friend Wegner, and a handful of other stragglers, including SS girls, Waffen-SS, Volksturm, and they're sheltering in the cellars of an old army barracks in Spandau to the west of the city.

Yes, which is where, of course, his army career started.

Start began.

Just three weeks earlier, you know, four weeks earlier or something.

I mean, when do you get called up?

29th of March, isn't it?

So, yeah.

So, a little over four weeks earlier.

And this isn't far from the Olympic Park.

Where actually there have been a lot of deserters or deserter murders, haven't there?

There's lots of people killed by the Olympic stadium, aren't there?

Lots of people rounded up and shot in the crisis at the end.

All these people hiding out together with Altner, they're discussing what what on earth they should do.

Does this mean the end of the war?

One of the officers that's left, Leitner Stickler, orders them out of the cellar to go and get their pay.

I mean, we talked about how incredible it is that he gets called up at all, that there's a postman that brings his papers, that the bureaucracy is functioning and all this other stuff.

But, you know, you get your pay book, get it stamped,

and get your 60 Reichsmarks.

It's just.

Don't spend it all at once.

I mean, really.

Yeah, yeah.

Completely crazy.

So this is the 1st of May.

Yeah.

So the battle isn't over because the battle isn't over in Berlin till the 2nd of May.

We're sort of slightly going back in time from the last episode.

Because last episode, we were focusing entirely on Hitler and the Führerbunker and Hitler's inner circle.

Now we're kind of going back out again.

And so we're sort of catching up with the events of the previous episode.

But, you know,

it's a day of uncertainty.

No one really knows what to do.

You know, where's the leadership?

You know, civilian refugees turning up more Volkssturm, more Waffen-SS.

You know, the latter always stick out because they've got better uniforms, they've got superior weapons and their distinct appearance, you know, and they're a bit older.

Then the news arrives from Gross Admiral Derners.

That night, they're all to try and break out and make it to join General Wenk and his 14th Army, I think, isn't it?

In the West.

Berlin's been surrounded for a week.

And the city is about to fall at any moment.

So any supplies in the barracks that have been distributed, and this is to prevent them falling into any hands, and they might as well use them.

So, suddenly, they've got bottles of schnapps and packets of long-life bread and sweets and tinned meat, and everyone's sort of just grabbing what they can and gorging themselves.

Inevitably, a number of troops get drunk and start throwing their arms around each other.

And Altma says, All the dams of discipline have been burst open.

Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

We are only living for today.

Carpe diem.

I mean, why not?

Anyway, later that afternoon, a further order of the day arrives from Turnitz talking about the ongoing fight against Bolshevism.

I mean,

oh my god, it's just so mad.

It's bonkers.

He's demanding unconditional commitment, discipline, and obedience.

We all know what that means.

You know, anyone holding back is a coward.

The oath of loyalty sworn to the Fuhrer applies without repetition to me as the Fuhrer's appointed head of state and successor of Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.

German soldiers, do your duty.

Or else.

The thing is, is Hitler's death has given everyone an opportunity to break that oath, and they're not signing up in any hurry, are they?

Well, no, exactly.

And, you know, they're told that day, you know, Hitler's dead.

The language is just the same.

And as if to prove the point, a major turns up and assures them that within a few days, there would be peace with the Western powers.

And then they'd only have the Soviets to deal with.

And then he goes, but whoever wants to desert will be shot.

The war goes on.

Your choice.

So, I mean, it's plain, isn't it, that the German high commander are delusional.

These are the orders of madmen.

I often think, you know, I mean, Donitz is absolutely extraordinary that he spared the gallows.

Luck of the devil, I mean, you know, the absolute luck of the devil.

Hear him and spear, they've got away with it.

Yeah.

The thing that distinguishes Donitz perhaps is he doesn't do the politicking that all the other number twos do.

And that's probably actually how he ends up getting his job in the end, isn't it?

Is that he's sort of

just been loyal.

He's just done what the Fuhrer wants.

But make no mistake, he's a despicable person.

Yes, absolutely disgusting person.

Yeah.

So the German high command, they're hanging on to the power they think they have.

So Feldmarschall Willen Keitel, he's been on the move, going from place to place.

Calling in on the Führer to wish him happy birthday.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Checking in on the Fuhrer and all that.

But on the first of May, he's at Wismar on the Baltic coast, which is the latest headquarters of the War Office and OKW.

And I mean, Keitel is sort of, he's chief of the Oberkommander of the Wehrmacht in 1938.

So it's interesting is that the Germans do innovate and have a tri-service general staff.

Well, that's a good idea, isn't it?

Before everyone else, the principles weren't a good idea.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

In practice, it's just Hitler's mouthpiece and his, you know, his call respectfully.

And obviously, they all despise each other.

Although, he does get on with General Alfred Yodel, who's his deputy.

I mean, his nickname, Keitel, is Lackai Tell, which is a play on Lackey.

Yeah.

Isn't it?

Lackai, Lackey.

So, you know, no one really, really thinks much of him.

Goering complains that Keitel, and Goering is capable of a good cutting remark.

Yeah, he certainly would.

He's the cleverest of a lot.

By far the cleverest of the lot, yeah.

That he has a sergeant's mind and a field marshal's body.

And Hitler says that Keitel's only been made the highest-ranking officer in the Wehrmacht because he's as loyal as a dog.

But Keitel's self-delusion knows no ends.

And, you know, he always pretends that he questions Hitler's decisions and offers counterweight.

But reality is he just does exactly what Hitler's told him to and always does.

What's amazing about his own memoir, which he writes while he's in prison, is he is obviously someone who...

doesn't have a lot of feelings.

No.

You know, he is emotionally completely blunted.

And what comes across really clearly is the death of Hitler has absolutely no emotional impact on him whatsoever.

Yeah, it's very weird, isn't it?

Really, really weird.

There's no kind of sort of, you know, and so our leader had gone and this, you know, I had to have a quiet moment where I just thought about everything, you know, anything like that.

The last time you saw Hitler was on the 23rd of April.

And he'd been saying, go to Berkesgarden, flee.

Couldn't persuade him.

So basically, gives up is the thing and retreats to AKW.

There's this sort of cluster of people around Dernitz, and they're trying to figure out where to settle.

Because it's not a new government quite yet, is it?

Dernitz's government.

It's sort of coagulating the people around him donits is in plern which i'd like to is spelt p-l-o with an umlern o with an umlaut n plern dernitz is in plern and asks to see keitel the following morning on may the 2nd at 8 o'clock in the morning and this is where keitel finds out that hitler's died just and finds out sweeps under the carpet it's literally his own okay i mean you could have just told him that yeah i don't know you could have told him anything yeah himmler arrives doesn't he and offers his service.

But, you know, he's so redundant.

Keitel and Derners loathe him.

Yeah.

You know, they think he's absolutely insufferable.

And Keitel suggests to Derners time to get lost.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But there's one thing they're not doing.

And that is discussing how to bring the war to an end, how to end hostilities, which is, I think, absolutely amazing.

That surely that is the very, very first thing that they should be dealing with.

But they don't.

No, no.

It's extraordinary.

So we're now on the 2nd of May.

Yep.

You You know, we're inching our way closer to the end.

And that's the day that red armies from the Third Shock Army or Assault Army, part of Zukov's first Belarusian front, break through the final defensive ring and into the Reich's Chancellery.

And you'll remember that Jelena Kagan, she is also part of the Third Shock Army.

So the Reich's Chancery is this massive building designed by Albert Spear.

It's actually survived pretty well in the battle, with most of the damage caused by Artillery and small arms rather than kind of allied bombs.

So it's, you know, it is intact.

And after a vicious firefight in the main hall, which is sort of full of sort of shiny marble and stuff, military and civilian staff are merging with their hands up as Soviet troops swarm through the rooms and the long corridors and down into an incredibly extensive underground complex of cellars.

Presumably, it's still there underground, you know, buried anyway.

But and Yelena Kagan is among the first into the building behind the Saul troops.

So there's a number of wounded still in the building, and so she hurries past men groaning in pain.

Intermittently, shooting breaks out.

But her job is to find Hitler and to quickly get her bearings in this kind of, you know, it's a massive complex.

So General Krebs, who we met in the last episode when he goes to visit Chukhov in the early hours of the 1st of May, you know, has reported that Hitler's killed himself.

But obviously the Soviet Union is completely run on paranoia, suspicion, and doubt.

And even the main state newspaper Pravda had questioned the rumors of the Führer's death or whether this was just a trick by the Nazis to cover up his escape.

So basically there's huge political and military pressure to find Hitler one way or another or prove one way or another what happened to him.

And she is part of this team to try and find this because of her ability to translate.

So eventually they find one of the mechanics called Carl Schneider who confessed that he'd been ordered to bring cans of fuel to the Fuhrer bunker in the Reich's Chancery Garden.

Yeah, which is absolutely extraordinary, isn't it?

Which also tells us that the people tied up in the Führerbunker complex in those events, if they've tried to get away, they they haven't got far.

Because after all, they've been surrounded by the Red Army.

There is no getting out of that.

So Schneider claims to have brought eight jerry cans, each of 20 litres.

Well, we all know those gerry cans, the classic ones.

So Schneider hasn't seen Hitler, but he's reported that the Führer's chauffeur, Eric Kempke, who we met in the last episode, had told him that the Führer was dead.

He was then asked to find more fuel only the previous day, the 1st of May, which he manages to get by siphoning it from a fleet of cars in the Reich's Chancery garages.

And so he gets another four cans, but not eight.

So Colonel Ivan Klimenko thinks this seems suspicious.

Of course he does because he's the head of the Schmirch unit attached to the Third Shock Army.

And Schmirsch is a counter-intelligence organisation.

So it's different to the KGB.

And

it's a bit like sort of...

I suppose it's MI5, MI6, isn't it?

It's that kind of thing.

Yeah.

He's meant to find everything suspicious, though.

They're meant to find everything suspicious, and they do.

And Smirsch is sort of against KGB, and KGB is against Smirch.

They're all rivals and all the rest.

Anyway, together with Schneider, this mechanic, and a cook called Wilhelm Langer, and another Red Army major called Major Bistrov of the Third Shock Army.

They pick their way across the blackened rubble and glass strewn and shell-cratered garden of the Reichschancery out the back and find the entrance to the Fuhrer bunker.

And of course, there's no one there.

They've all broken out by this point.

And it's dark and dank and fetid.

And the place is a mess.

Papers strewn everywhere.

Sign of a complex left in Ari.

And Kagan, of course, has to now begin the work of gathering papers by the light of a hurricane lamp.

Yeah.

But it doesn't take her much to find a mass of papers left by Martin Borman and, crucially, for posterity, the diary of Joseph Goebbels.

Incredible.

Which, of course, post-war is published.

You still can buy it to this day.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Absolutely incredible, that, isn't it?

So, Yelena Cargan has discovered this treasure trove of documents in the Fuhrer bunker.

We're going to take a very quick break.

We'd be back in a second.

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Welcome back to Weird Vaser Making.

You talk with me, I'm Marian James Holland.

We are in Berlin.

It's the 2nd of May, 1945.

It's the 2nd of May, 1945.

The city is falling.

The city is falling.

Germany has fallen.

The ordinary lives of every German citizen has changed radically with the death of Adolf Hitler becoming public.

And if you're Helmut Altner, who's 17 years old, has been in the army only a couple of weeks, could you even say you'd been in the army?

Well, I suppose he's been in, you know, strictly speaking, probably getting on for five weeks.

Yeah, but you know what I mean.

Well, yeah, I guess, yes, because he's got his pay book, he's got his sold book, hasn't he?

He has been paid for his.

So he is official.

Yeah, I was a soldier for five weeks.

What about the guy who's you know gets to the front and is killed on the first day?

Yeah, but he might have had two years of training, mightn't he?

Yeah, yeah, but anyway, Helmut Altner is still.

We last time we left him, he was in his barracks in Spandau with this motley crew of women, children, Waffen-SS, Volkssturm, you know, Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

They decided it's time to break out and try and follow their orders, which is to try and break through to Venk's 14th Army, which is outside the encirclement to the west.

So beyond Potsdam, basically.

And obviously their chances of reaching him are literally next to zero.

But anyway, that's what they're being told to do.

And if they don't have a go at it, they're going to be shot anyway.

So they might as well

have a crack.

So they go out into the streets, past the S-Barn station in Spandau, pass another barricade, which Altner managed to nimbly jump over.

It's still dark in that morning, but the air's alive with the tinny crackle of small arms.

You know, German four-barrel cannon is providing cover and pumping shells towards Spando Town Hall.

And the enemy are firing back, dead littering the streets.

Somehow, they've got to get across the road bridge, which is still intact, and over the Harvel.

And Altner is sort of stuck at the underpass of the bridge's ramp.

A truck suddenly speeds towards it, windscream splintered and running over the dead and wounded as it surges forward.

I mean, it's awful, isn't it?

Machine gun salvos burst out, grenades explode, but it provides a brief bit of cover for Altner and his few comrades he's with to quickly scamper from the underpass to the other side of the road and ready to make their dash across the bridge.

So occasionally people are jumping out of the shadows, wrecked buildings.

And I mean, it is like some sort of dark kind of movie, isn't it?

Escape from New York or something.

It's like a scene from a zombie film, isn't it?

Yes.

Escape, the collapse of civilization.

So shots ring out.

Altner's glancing around and he sees amidst the troops there's women with babies in their arms all trying to get across this bridge and head west.

So he takes a deep breath, jumps up and runs.

And bullets are pinging all around him and the surface of the bridge is slick with blood.

There's bodies strewn over the road.

You know, there's crushed bodies that have been run over, vehicles desperately trying to get across.

I mean, it's just absolute carnage, isn't it?

Yeah.

The smashed trucks hit the bridge superstructure.

It was half across the roadway.

A woman and a soldier taking cover between his wheels.

Altner passes by a pillar and a dead man as more shells hit the bridge.

And he says, I jump up again.

I can see figures ahead of me running and stumbling through the fog.

I'm without feeling and run, jumping over the dead and trampling on the wounded.

Everyone is for himself.

Yeah.

And there's a cross.

He's made it.

Crouching by the barricade at the far side, lungs absolutely gasping.

You know, he's made it, but glances back and sees more tanks trying to...

crush, crushing people as they go.

Others riddled with bullets, Hitler, youth, young girls, old men, women with babies.

Death plays his dance, mowing his bloody path.

I mean, it's a vivid picture, isn't it?

It certainly is.

Yeah.

And then he pushes on.

There's a factory up ahead.

There's a Woffen-SS half-track at the crossroads.

A machine gun team are dead, who've been killed trying to set the weapon up.

The crowd from the barracks are crouching by the factory gate.

Then mortars start up.

Yep.

Shells crashing around them.

They hurry on through the gate, through the factory, which is smashed up.

Abandoned lathes, milling machines.

You know, reading this, it's vivid and it's so, I mean, it's beyond my realm of comprehension.

You know, they're dead everywhere.

A railway embankment ahead and housing as well as summer houses with gardens and allotments.

So they've reached the Gartenstadt Starken.

And now they're being shelled.

They're being chased, aren't they?

Yeah, they're basically being pursued.

By bullets and shells.

By Soviet gunnery.

And he spots a small air raid shelter, one of the gardens ahead, which is crowded with people.

So he runs past that altner, runs past that, and then down to the nearest house, down into the cellar, and hides in there.

And that's packed as well.

I mean, there is everywhere that can possibly offer cover is already taken.

Yes.

Yeah.

Anyway, more shells, more explosions.

The house shakes, windows in the basement rattle.

You know, he can't bear it there packed into the cellar.

He just thinks, you know, this is just, he's completely claustrophobic.

So he goes back up into the house.

There's traces of blood on the whole floor.

All the windows are smashed.

There's glass everywhere.

You know, it's just absolutely hideous.

And so he heads upstairs, looks out over the garden, and the small air raid shuttle that he's seen just minutes before is now gone.

There's nothing more than a big hole in the ground and bodies strewn and body parts scattered everywhere.

And a man is brought into the house of a wound to the abdomen and his scrotum torn off, his bullsack gone.

And, you know, Altner knows he's going to die without help.

And of course, there isn't any.

So he's a dead man.

And then eventually the shelling stops.

So Altner and a few others move off.

I mean, it's sort of surreal, isn't it?

It's just climbing over fences along culverts, you know, ducking, diving.

And they hurry down into a cellar.

And there's Leutner's Stickler pulling out his map.

And incredibly, there's about 20 of them from the barracks are still together and in one piece.

It's like they're prey,

being pursued by a monster that's going to eat them.

It feels like that, doesn't it?

Completely.

So Stickler goes, right, we've got to get to the Durbolitz training area.

That's what we've got to get to.

This is still a training area and it's an area sort of beyond the edge of the city.

You know, at the edge of Berlin, you've got all these sort of lakes, haven't you, and woods and things and heathlands.

It's heathland, that's what it is.

The sort of gauze and stuff.

Anyway, that's where they're going to get to.

And they think, you know, well, you know, that's where they'll find the Venk army is still behind the village of Derbelis.

And once they're there, they'll be safe.

They'd get some rest for several weeks in the Venk camp while the relief army retakes Potsdam and now,

you know, it's just la-la-land stuff.

But I suppose, you know, they've got to hold on to something, haven't they?

So he looks around.

There's no sign of Wegner or any of his other mates.

But of the 150 men with which he'd joined and headed to the front, only he and his friend Blackzek are in the cellar now with Stickler.

Yeah, incredibly.

So two out of 150.

Doesn't mean all 150 dead, but it suggests they are.

No, but they're gone.

Scattered.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it quietens down.

So Stickler leads his posse out.

And they kind of, there's some tanks and assault gums.

There's a Luftwaffe general talking to a Waffen-SS officers.

So they're told to kind of write, you're with us now.

And they're the last exodus leaving from Berlin.

And there's a sort of, you know, roar of engines and off they go.

and enemy is opening up from the buildings as their tanks rumble past so they're now bursting through enemy lines you know this is where the Red Army already are

so only wounded to be taken on vehicles for those fit unable to walk have to walk Altner clings to the front wing of a truck front wing gripping the slits of the bonnet I mean goodness me a young girl is on the other side also clutching the cab for dear life and as it races off and swings around a corner Altner nearly falls off up ahead is a wounded man in the street.

You know, he catches the guy's look of shock and then they go straight over him.

And a moment later there's a scream and the girl on the right wing has gone too.

You know, it's just a horror story.

So they're clear of the suburbs and are now heading towards the heathland of Durburitz.

There's some vehicles up ahead which are stuck in sand.

You know, it's that really sandy kind of soil, which is such a feature of Heathland, but such a feature of Berlin as a whole, which is why kind of Speer's dream of Germania is probably never ever going to be realized, even if it was the most successful state in Europe, you know, but no chance.

Eight horses are straining to clear a gun that's slipped into a ditch.

So civilians, soldiers, massive people are trundling past.

You know, and Outlaw just thinks, where the hell did they all come from?

How'd they got here?

Then there's another holdup as a truck up ahead gets stuck on a bend.

They pause and moments later shells start screaming in yet again.

The truck up ahead is hit, bursts into flames, people jumping off, running into fields, clovers on fire.

I mean, we've all seen that scene in loads of war movies, haven't we?

The car in front can't move either because a mangled body has become caught in the wheels.

I mean, how revolting.

Altner jumps off the truck, heads towards a ditch to take cover when something hits him and knocks him to the ground.

He goes, I look in horror.

It's a bloody something without either head, hands, or feet.

Just a bloody, smashed torso.

I mean, ugh.

So he scrambles to his feet, runs along a ditch,

uniform covered in blood, then up out onto an open field.

Red Army aircraft are thundering overhead, dropping bombs and strafing.

Track has become a column of burning, twisted vehicles, dead and wounded strewn everywhere.

Herd of cattle gone demented, stampeding crazily.

I mean, that sort of almost underlines the insanity of the whole thing.

And he wonders whether this is ever going to end, but kind of pulls himself up despite the searing agony of his feet because he's also been hit in the foot at this point.

During this little shootout, he's got a little shrapnel wound in his foot, which is going through his boot.

But he just thinks, I've got to live, I've got to keep hurrying on.

And it's not even midday on the 2nd of May, and all this has happened already.

Yeah, absolutely extraordinary.

As he gets himself going, he's nearly knocked over by a riderless horse.

Yes.

Just running, careering past.

But I hurry on.

Not looking.

I just want to live, only to live.

And as you say, not even noon on May 2nd.

And he's got a wound in his foot.

yeah yeah yeah so back to elena cargan who we left in the führer banker with this treasure trove of documents they also find the goebbels bodies of uh joseph and magda goebls don't yeah it's about five o'clock that day yeah which they find on the garden placed on an unhinged wooden door charred and blackened body of goebbels although he's still recognizable because there isn't enough fuel the third reich there isn't enough fuel for any given situation and the incineration of goebbels corpse is no exception and his yellow tie that has somehow survived the flames, and the prosthesis on his leg for his club foot.

He's born with tallapis, so he's got a club foot.

Yeah, that's right, like Byron.

Yeah, peculiarly, it's not until the next day that they find the Goebbels children discovered by Lieutenant Leonid Illion.

They're lying in their bunk beds, and there's still the smell of almonds from the cyanide in the bunker.

The girls are in their nightgowns, the boys are in pajamas.

It's just so horrible.

Faces are pink.

And Jelena writes, the children seemed alive and only sleeping.

And they only figure out who they are because they bring Vice Admiral Hans Erich Voss back to the Vierbanker back to the scene of the crime.

He goes, oh, yeah, they're the, and he's the Kriegsmarine liaison officer here.

That's right.

And he says, yeah, yeah, that's the Goebbels' kids.

And he also is able to confirm that Hitler's killed himself.

So they know they know from someone who's present.

They need proof, though.

Yeah,

of course they do need proof.

And Major Bistroff says, Did you know these children?

He says, Yes, I saw them only yesterday.

He points out Heidi the youngest and names them all so it's not exactly um kilpura any of this is you know they're piecing together the crimes in the führer bunker and the death of hitler yes it's fair to say that their little grey cells are whirring though i'd say yeah

but they can't stay it's too noxious isn't it with the smoke and the fumes to stay in the government district all night so jelena and her team they go back to the outskirts and they're looking for somewhere to sleep.

She suddenly hears the distinct call of a nightingale.

It had seemed that here in Berlin, not only all living things, but even the stones of the city have been drawn into the war and subject to its laws.

But then, all of a sudden, a nightingale, in complete disregard of everything, was irrepressibly getting on with what nightingales get on with.

Yes.

Even in the apocalypse, spring has sprung.

Last time I heard a nightingale was outside those caves in Anzio.

Do you remember where they were all hiding?

Yeah.

Yeah.

In that company of the 45th Thunderbird division.

And they had to do that breakout.

And just these incredible old caves, these Roman caves.

And they were all there.

And just opposite, there's a field.

And then there was these trees.

And these nightingales were just singing their little hearts out.

It was absolutely the most amazing thing.

Anyway, that's by the by.

So let's catch up with Helmer Altner and what happens to him because this is just an amazing, absolutely amazing end to his war.

Yeah.

Well, so it's the Thursday, the 3rd of May now.

As dawn had been breaking, he feels absolutely exhausted.

He's completely spent.

He'd walked the whole of the previous evening, despite having this piece of shrapnel in his boot, across the entire Durbritz training area.

There is no Wenck army on the other side, the far side.

Of course there isn't.

And they now make their way towards Brandenburg.

There's some 500 of them in a wood, just waves and strays.

It's not the people he set off with, is it?

It's just whoever.

And he's soaking from the morning dew, shivering with cold.

He leans against a tree and rummages in his haversack and pulls out his last tin and the pocket knife.

His mum, and remember his mum saying, it's not going to be any fun, is it?

Your life's going to be shit, but all the best to you, son.

Yeah, good luck, kid.

The blade breaks as he tries to open the tin.

And the major watching this hands him his knife silently.

Finally, prizes open the tin.

spreads sausage over a couple of pieces of long-life bread he'd saved and ate.

Strength returns to my body with renewed courage to face life.

Sometimes that's all you need: a sausage sandwich.

He's a Berliner, after all.

A sausage sandwich can solve most

problems.

When you're being pursued relentlessly and murderously by the Red Army, what else but a sausage sandwich?

And so they push on.

And I love this.

A Waffen S officer reckons there might be a gap in the Russian lines.

Yeah, I reckon there might.

Give it a go.

Give it a go.

Between Pavazin and Wezeran.

And this is the mindset.

Maybe we can get to the Elba and the Americans and surrender to the Americans who will be nice to us.

Which is the thrust of so many German surrenders at this stage of the war.

Across open fields in the sunshine, butterflies flip by.

The grounds, I mean, a perfect sort of late spring morning.

There's a village in the distance and figures and vehicles up ahead.

They think they're German, so they keep moving.

And then suddenly the shelling starts.

Here we go again.

Here we go again.

He must have thought, oh God, here we go again.

And he finds himself wading through a marshy area heading for a wood.

And he's with the older Volksdorn men because they're keeping going.

And the wood is getting closer and closer.

He's thinking, that's sanctuary in the wood.

We can just get there.

There's shouts from behind suddenly.

And he turns and sees it's Russians.

I mean, of course it's Russians.

And they run on.

He throws his pistol away, but then pausing to catch his breath, he decides to head towards the enemy, doesn't he?

And somewhere a lark rises, he says, somewhere a lark rises singing, but I do not see it.

I am dead beat and empty.

We have been through hell and the sun shines over the spring countryside as we go across the fields with pounding hearts, an aircraft engine in the distance, sounding like a big bumblebee.

Everything was so pointless.

The dead, the flowing blood, the horror.

And it reminds me a bit of the...

Do you remember there was that quote from O Burst Mouse, Wilhelm Maus in Casino, where he says, this destruction's going to come here, but it's all going to be fine because the war will pass.

Nature will regrow it over and it reminds me of that a little bit the nightingale singing the skylark rising you know nature continuing amongst all this sort of mayhem well and what's extraordinary here is as they go to the russians who've been shelling them and killing them and all this sort of thing the russian soldier stands there waiting for him offers him his arm supporting him helping him because he's lame and takes out two cigarettes lights both of them gives one to alt and says war over all go home i mean he's let off.

Two minutes ago.

Two minutes ago, we're trying to kill you.

He says, just go.

And he does.

Just go home.

It's absolutely incredible.

And at that moment, everything that he's been through, everything that's happened, a sort of combination of grief, relief, shock,

he just completely breaks down.

Absolutely just sits there, falls on his knees and just sobs.

So a sausage sandwich, the lark rising, and Ivan offering him a fag.

It's the Holy Trinity.

It's the trifecta of the end of the war.

One of my great mates says that a cup of tea, a Kit Kat, and a pack of cheese and onion are forkers Chris as the Holy Trinity.

Well, he's got a point.

Speaks with great wisdom.

But for Alner, it's a lark cigarette or no sausage sandwich and a Russian.

Anyway.

Well, just one other point about that, of course, is that the Altner war come to an end on the 3rd of May, 24 hours after the fall of Berlin.

Yeah.

His war is officially over 24 hours earlier, but it isn't.

Well, yes, yeah.

I'm sure that relentless pursuit was running away.

We would all do the same.

We just feel there's nothing we can, I've got to get away from here.

So much of that, they sound like animals being chased, or they sound, like, reminds me of a fox being chased by a pack of dogs more than anything else.

So, at the other end of the Third Reich, on the same day, Keitel and Dernitz are now discussing how to end the war.

They're finally grasping that nettle.

But they've moved further into Holstein to Flensburg, which is where this new Reich government will situate itself.

And Dernitz, you know, the penny's dropped.

But what he wants to do he still isn't going to just surrender what he wants to do is try and surrender as many people as many german soldiers as many germans as he can to the western allies rather than the red army because they know what they've done in the east it's as simple as that isn't it isn't it but

of course it's a but there's a big butt of this because this is still part of the kind of grand delusion yeah because how are they going to surrender to the americans okay so you've got to think about this and they surrender to the americans by crossing the river river elba are there any bridges crossing the river elba no no there's one bridge which has collapsed which people can still walk across and this is at a place called tangamunda which i've been to it's a long way across the bridge is broken there's lots of film footage and photo footage of this happening are three million german troops going to be able to go across this one footbridge In this one little village, in this one little tiny corner of Elba?

Of course they're not.

You know, so you're not going to save anything more than a trickle.

How many more people people are going to be killed in the continuing days?

It's insane.

It's ridiculous.

And why can't they see this?

It is absolutely ridiculous.

I think there is actually no explanation for this.

They've never had a grip on the real world.

No.

So why would they have one now?

I think is the way you really have to look at it.

The whole of the war has been the pursuit of delusion.

So the fact that they're still in the grasp of, yes, Hitler's spell's broken, so they know they've got to end the war.

And that for millions of Germans, that now means the oath to Hitler's over and they can surrender yeah but the fact that they aren't prepared to see this that they can't see this and also this is the only thing that's on offer for the Allies unconditional surrender the Allies aren't doing unconditional surrender with a nudge and a wink they've not been doing that no at all so you know I mean Berliners are confronting the Russian hordes Ruth Andreas Friedrich and her partner Andrik and the four refugees they've got they're now trying to clean up aren't they sort of get rid of the excrement and all the rest of it

yeah yeah there's no amenities there's still no proper water water.

You have to haul water from the well.

And she says, hauling water from the well takes hours every day.

We work like slaves, kindle the fire, gather wood, chop wood, sweep up the rubble, cleaning up, constantly cleaning up.

And the Russian troops, Soviet troops come up, but they just take what they want.

They look at us as though we don't exist, she writes.

Clock clock, they say sometimes.

So they want your watch, schnapps, and velocipede.

A bicycle.

which is a bicycle.

It has to be, doesn't it, that the reason in Flensberg they're not getting to grips with the end of the war or they're trying to finagle surrenderers is that they're living a fantasy land.

It has to be, doesn't it, Jim?

It has to be.

I just, you know, there's so many times where Germans just make really, really odd decisions.

And, you know, you kind of expect Hitler to be

terrible decisions, but not some of these highly experienced men.

I'm sort of thinking about Eric Marx sort of going off after the, you know, on D-Day going after the airborne troops.

I mean, he should have known better.

You know, you think about things which make just no sense whatsoever.

You know, not understanding, not appreciating where the hammer is likely to fall in Normandy, for example.

You know, it doesn't take rocket science to kind of really work all that out.

No.

And, you know, this is sort of total idiocy of assuming that by holding out more days, more people are going to save their lives.

I mean, that's just ridiculous.

Yeah.

Or, you know, going along with...

you know, the Ardennes offensive or whatever it might be.

It just none of it makes any sense.

It's just, it's so, it's really hard to kind of look at this kind of stuff rationally.

Anyway, while Victors are still looking for their kind of watches and bicycles and schnapps, Jelena Kagan is working flat out of the Reichschancery looking for the trail of what's happened to Hitler.

So on the 4th of May, she briefly managed to escape outside the building.

She's been interrogating a German stoker who'd been called in to fix a vaulty ventilator in the Führer bunker and had inadvertently become a witness to Hitler's wedding.

I mean, just

amazing.

Anyway, the interrogation's gone on and on and on, combined with the vast mass of papers she's having to pull through.

She's absolutely delighted to be able to sort of get out for a little bit.

And in the company of their driver, Sergei, they walk up towards the Brandenburg gate and then onto the still smoking Reichstag, which is just an...

absolute ruin.

I mean, the pictures of it are just extraordinary.

And above the skeleton of the dome is the Soviet red flag fluttering, and the lower windows are already being boarded up and covered in graffiti.

And with a stubby pencil, Sergei writes, hello to to all Siberians.

And

Yelena feels that she needs to do something too.

So she adds her own greetings to all Muscovites.

And outside, the streets are mostly deserted of civilians, but there's Red Army vehicles rumbling by and

all the rest of it.

directed by red army girls with white gloves.

They cross a bridge over the spree, inching past a German truck that's upside down.

And someone's written on the side, all our wheels are turning for the voor.

And Kagan spots a German woman sitting on the bridge, legs outstretched, her head framed back, and laughing hysterically.

I mean, just that's extraordinary.

Kagan greets her, but the woman looks back with dazed, unfocused eyes and then shouts, Alex Kaput, Alex Kaput.

Damn right, it is.

Anyway, that same day, the 4th of May, Hitler's body is finally discovered.

Not in South America, not in the fuselage of Hannah Reich's plane, Erado, but in the, of course, in the Reich's Chancery Garden.

By chance.

Completely by chance.

And the people who've discovered him don't know that it's him.

So his remains are found totally by chance by a Red Army private called Ivan Churikov of the 79th Corps, which is also part of the third shock army.

And then under the instructions of Colonel Klemenko, they had decided to give the Reich's Chancery Garden just one last inspection.

But Churikov's attention had been drawn to a loose soil in a shell crater just below the bunker exit.

And then, on closer inspection, he sees the remains of human legs.

Charred human legs.

And so he and Klemenko then begin digging and discover not one, but two bodies.

And Klemenko doesn't think either of them could be Hitler because he'd heard reports that two bodies had been discovered the previous day, were likely to be those of Fuhrer and his wife.

But unbeknown to Klemenko, who is a Schmirsch guy, he's a Schmirsch colonel, they'd already been discounted.

But Klemenko only discovers later that night, the 4th of May, that the bodies found on the 3rd of May are definitely not Hitler.

So early the next day, the 5th of May, he sends four of his men under Captain Deriabin to dig up the remains in the shell hole.

So it's now the 5th of May.

And they uncover a male and a female and two dead dogs.

And of course, one of the dead dogs is Hitler's Alsatian Blondie.

Yeah.

So Yelena Kagan is then witnessed to the recovery of these bodies, but

they have to do a sort of sneaky bit of abduction the following morning, the 6th of May, because by that stage, the 5th shock army, not the third shock army, is taking over the command of Berlin.

And it's ordering the Reichschancery and bunker complex to be cleared.

So Colonel Kramenko is absolutely determined that no one else is going to get their hands on his precious bodies now he's found them and certainly not before they've been forensically examined.

So having wrapped them in sheets and behind the backs of the new sentries, they're sneakily passed over the wall of the Reich's Chancery Garden to where there are a pair of trucks waiting, and then they're whisked away to Smirsch headquarters now at Buch,

which is just to the north of Berlin.

I mean, can you believe it?

But actually, I can, because it's the Russians and it's this Red Army and it's the Soviets and it's Schmirch and KGB and, you know, everyone's a rival.

I mean, the British Army, what would have happened is you'd have had some regimental rivalry.

Someone would have not known what was going on.

I mean, I think this is the chaos chaos of war after all as much as anything else isn't it and uh the rough and tumble of um mad events anyway that's hitler's body being spirited away berlin has fallen the war has ended for altner alas kaput alas kaput alas kaput but that means of course that at some point the government in flensburg we call it a government loosely dernitz and his cronies in flensberg need to put pen to paper and surrender unconditionally to the allies it's the only way out it's the only way out but they're not going to do that by simply surrendering saying, all right, we're done, and issuing a telegram.

They're going to try and horse trade and wangle their way to the surrender they want to effect.

Find out if they succeed in our next episode.

Cheerio.

It doesn't constitute a spoiler to say they haven't got much of a chance.

Anyway, we'll see you next time.

Cheerio.

Chussy Chus.